Don't Fight the Referee

As some of you might have seen on Twitter, I’m moving to Chicago this month to attend grad school. Full disclosure, I have no idea what I’ll be doing with this Tumblr -- if it’ll become more of a personal thing, like my Twitter has slowly morphed into, or if I’ll occasionally check it out or abandon it altogether since it served its purpose as a mouth for the podcast and that podcast is over now. Regardless, thank you all for listening, for reading, for reaching out with questions and for letting me cover something that I loved so much. 

abrazos, 

“After we won the Cup in Anaheim [in 2007] I threw my skates in the garbage,” Thornton told SI.com with the air of someone telling the run-up to a joke. “It turned out someone actually grabbed them,” he said, incredulous. “Who the hell would want to own a pair of my skates?”

Wherever those skates ended up is a mystery lost to time. This wasn’t the last time he’d see his final pair, though.

“I was joking around with [Florida Panthers equipment assistant,] Brian Godin, telling him that story,” Thornton continued. “I told him, you can 100 percent be sure after this last game I'm throwing my skates in the garbage and I don't think anybody's going to want them.

“We were laughing about it but I'm like, no, I'm 100 percent serious: I'm throwing them in the garbage, never putting them on again,” said Thornton. “I just kept my word.”

While the rest of his team headed off to Washington, D.C. for the final game of the season, once Thornton had finished his interviews and the last reporters had slowly filtered out of the dressing room he dressed and dropped his skates in the closest trash bin, usually the destination of empty bottles of Gatorade and balls of used tape. That done, he headed upstairs to celebrate the end of his career with his family and friends.

We answered this in a previous podcast, but to reiterate for those who missed it: There’s no real difference between deaf or hearing hockey. Deaf people simply play deaf hockey. You should certainly give that episode a listen, though; head coach Jackie McMillan has a lot of interesting insights on how a team comprised of Deaf and hearing-impaired people works.

“In our first Worlds, we finished in second place,” said Téllez. “Nobody believed in Team Mexico. We came in seeded second the following year, 2016, and finished in fourth. That experience stuck with us, because we thought we would be able to accomplish more, but I think that was a reflection of our level of experience.”

If you’re interested in learning more about the Deaf Women’s NT or watching clips of their games, follow the link below!